Drayton McLane v. Bud Selig: Who is the Astros' 2008 Scape Goat

by Stephen Higdon on Oct 31, 2008 12:15 AM CDT

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The other day I threw out a list of possible candidates for our scape goat in 2008 and there emerged only two clear favorites: Drayton McLane (10 votes) and Bud Selig (13 votes).* Since you, the readers, have spoken and elected two great candidates to be the person we focus our angst from the 2008 season on, it's now up to you do make the final decision. Do we blame Drayton McLane who pinched pennies on the farm system and who refused to stand up to Selig to not have our Ike games made up at the end of the season? Or do we blame Bud Selig, the man who saw neutrality in a 90 minute drive from Chicago to Miller Park?

*Tally at time of publishing

Poll

Drayton or Bud?

Drayton McLane

22 votes

Bud Selig

23 votes

45 votes | Poll has closed

0 recs | 10 comments

Comments

I had to go with my gut on this

By which I mean a coin toss. Drayton: heads it was.

Stephen Higdon - October 31, 2008 reply

Drayton is the source of all of our problems,

but also much of our successes back in the day.

Still, it’s all his fault. What Bud did wasn’t cool, but he didn’t make the decisions three years ago that hurt the Astros.

Only_A_Lad - October 31, 2008 reply

Drayton - not even close

the paradox is that he has been probably the best owner in Astros history as well. But I blame him most for Carlos Lee and his bloated contract and for choosing to go with old & busted in picking Ed Wade as the GM to replace Purpura as his primary sins. The list of lesser failures is much longer.

re: Bud
I thought the funniest thing about the WS snafu was that it illustrated one of the main points of the whole Ike games fiasco: that basically one team was going to get screwed more than the other and Bud decided that it would be the Astros. The reasons for this are 1) that MLB has no significant control over its schedule once it’s posted; it’s a slave to TV, and 2) Bud has pretty much unlimited powers as commissioner to do whatever he feels like (see his proclamation that game 5 would have been in a rain delay ‘until Thanksgiving’ if the Rays had not tied the score, in clear violation of MLB rules).

I’ve thought about it, and I’m not sure that the commissioner’s dictatorial control is terrible. This is still just a game, and things usually work most efficiently when the buck actually stops with someone. If there was a committee in charge of things, or every issue came down to a vote of the owners, things would be far more bollixed up than they are. The owners are running a business and to a certain extent, they can cut some corners. I think what they need to do is hire someone who isn’t a joke for the most part to handle such a big job. Bud doesn’t measure up.

I’m not sure what can be done about the enslavement to TV. The late start times, ridiculous scheduling during the early round of the playoffs, regular season blackout restrictions, no scheduled double-headers, are all things that are mostly due to the demands of TV. That said, I would be really upset if I didn’t have the option to watch almost every game the Astros play on TV. But MLB has reached the point where TV is too powerful and they have to be able to push back. I’d argue that the major bar to making up the Ike games after the season was the start of the playoffs one day after the season ended. There was no way Fox/TBS would allow a series to be delayed and their schedule screwed up. So the Astros got screwed.

lnewcomer - October 31, 2008 reply